We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with the Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, and memoirist Neko Case (The Harder I Fight the More I Love You) about surrealist Angela Carter’s effortless prose, and novelist, playwright, and director Chris Kraus (The Four Spent the Day Together, I Love Dick) about the “Zen slap” of Chester Himes.
Neko Case on Angela Carter
What do you most appreciate about Angela Carter’s work?
Her sentences are so beautiful and she’s so smart. She’s known as this great feminist, which is true, but she does it without you even knowing it, because there’s so much story. The story itself is so good, and the sentences are so good, politics aren’t the first thing you’re thinking of when you’re reading the book—they’re like the sixth thing. All her sentences stand on their own. They’re very nimble, well-weighted, like how swallows fly: they’re so good at it that they make it look effortless. Every sentence is beautiful or really funny. It’s a real tragedy that she died so young.
She died young, yet she had a prolific output. When there’s somebody who just churns out writing like her, where do you think that comes from?
I think people who know they’re here to create don’t want to waste any time. Ideas breed other ideas. It keeps you on your toes. You want to honor all the ideas, try them all out, visit every rabbit hole. It’s a difficult dance, but it can be done.
The only copy of her work I could get on short notice was The Infernal Desire Machine of Dr. Hoffman, and wow.
Oh yeah, that one’s bananas. The one that I think is the craziest and the most, like, whoa—but also one of the best books I’ve ever read—is The Passion of the New Eve. It goes outside of gender and into an apocalyptic landscape. It’s really interesting and harrowing and heartbreaking and beautiful. I was introduced to her by my friend Sally Timms, who gave me a copy of Nights at the Circus, which I think is her most well-known book. But she has a trillion that are fantastic. The Haunted Toy Shop is one of my favorites, and I’m also a huge fan of Wise Children, so it’s hard to pick a favorite of hers. I love her fairy tales, too—her versions of Bluebeard and Little Red Riding Hood.
She died while working on a sequel to Jane Eyre, which seems like it would require insane confidence. Where do you think she got that confidence from?
It’s probably the same force that spurred her to write new versions of fairy tales. She wanted to fix it. She wanted to see what that would have been like with women actually… Not that Jane Eyre wasn’t like this, but there were so many societal limitations when Jane Eyre was written, and a lot when Angela Carter was writing, but she didn’t pay attention to them. She really pushed. It seems like her taking the Brontë sisters to the fair. Like, “Let’s cut loose!” It seems like joy more than arrogance.
She gets very far out at times. Do you think anything is lost when a story veers into the extremely surreal?
I don’t think it subtracts anything. I love to read a story where you’re not told what happens in the end. You’re left to draw your own conclusions. When you’re in the mystery and trying to figure out where the story’s going, there’s an electricity in following the idea. David Lynch talks about that a lot—how the idea is the best thing going. Nobody has to spoon-feed you the ending. It’s nice when an author respects you enough to let you draw your own conclusions.
Chris Kraus on Chester Himes
Chester Himes’s prison-to-Paris biography is so fantastic that he seems like a fictional character himself.
Himes pretty much taught himself to write. It was kind of an anomaly that he was in prison at all. His father was either a college professor or a dean in the Midwest, so he was from an educated family. He was expected to go to college, but when he was 19 years old, he sort of acted out with his armed burglary and ended up with this impossibly long sentence of 20 years or so. His mother advocated tirelessly for him, and he was released seven years later. But he started writing while he was in prison. He was a great reader, and he started writing stories and sending them to magazines.
What do you think of his work on a page level?
Deceptively careless. I think maybe I relate to that, coming from a post-New York School kind of thing. The New York School had that deceptively casual style, and Himes, instead of crafting his prose until it shone, would just spew out. I remember reading The End of a Primitive with some grad students. We started picking it apart line by line. His excessive description was almost passive-aggressive. He was describing the writer’s room in the rooming house: the dirty refrigerator, the countertop, the filthy molding, the fading wallpaper. It was like that early Chantal Akerman movie where the camera does a 360-degree pan around the room. Himes was doing the same thing. Nobody at the time wanted to read that kind of durational, obsessive description. Was he trying to make a point about the sordidness of the rooming house? Was he trying to just fill space? It was so clever, and so confrontational without being directly confrontational. I loved it. There is something about the pacing and rhythm of that novel that is like an incantation, where the pulse keeps building and building to the point where it can only end in violence.
He captures all the cadences—especially in the later novels—of street speech wrapped up in these tight little plots that spun and spun and spun, and then would just end exactly on the mark. I read in one of the biographies that when he was doing the Série Noire books, he didn’t take them all that seriously. There was a minimum page count, and he’d put that number of pages on his desk, keep going and going, and when he was getting towards the bottom, “Oh, time to wrap it up now.”
How do you think his time in prison impacted his work?
Going to prison was not an inevitability for him. He was not born into the kind of background where you have a 50 percent chance at the gate of going to prison because of the neighborhood you live in. He was going to college, but he put himself around criminals because he was attracted to that world. So he always had a foot in both worlds. He was able to communicate incarceration and that kind of underclass experience to a more educated audience, which includes, after all, the people who read books.
The other thing about Himes’s work is that, because he had a foot in both worlds, he was able to be very acerbic and sarcastic about the high-culture part of his life. There are books by people who’ve had these experiences that are published as a kind of exotica or novelty act, and it’s assumed that the writer is naive and just very grateful to be invited into the fold of the cultural world. But belonging to both places at the same time, Himes was able to really bite the hand that fed him in a very delightful and amusing way. He was a great satirist on top of everything else. His books are really, really funny. His perspective was so passive-aggressive confrontational, like a Zen slap.
